Question

How can I make find apply my shell’s defined functions and aliases inside its exec parameter?

For example I have defined a function analogous to bzip2 but using 7z:

function 7zip() { for f in $@; do ls -alF “$f”; 7za a -t7z -m0=lzma
-mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=64m -ms=on “$f.7z” “$f” && touch -r “$f” “$f.7z” && rm -fv “$f” && ls -alF “$f.7z”; done; }

When I find files older than 7 days to compress:

find . -mtime +7  -name "G*.html"   -execdir  7zip {}  + 

Rather than expanding 7zip it errors Command Not Found.

This is all inside a shell script.

Answer 1

All four of these command works just fine with the function call. Adjust your find specs as need be.. They all cater for spaces in file names. Personally, I can’t see the point of shelling out to another bash instance, but I’ve included two versions which call bash.

IFS=$'\n'; f=($(find /tmp -maxdepth 1 -name "$USER.*")); f7zipi "${f[@]}"

IFS=; find /tmp -maxdepth 1 -name "$USER.*" | while read -r f ;do f7zipi "$f"; done 

IFS=$'\n'; bash -c 'IFS=; f7zipi "$@"' 0 $(find /tmp -maxdepth 1 -name "$USER.*")  

find /tmp -maxdepth 1 -name "$USER.*" -exec bash -c 'IFS=; f7zipi "$@"' 0 {} +;   

---

What follows is how I’ve set up the function, using GNU bash 4.1.5 in Ubuntu 10.04

BTW. You should use local f in your function, so that it does not clash with the calling script’s variable of the same name.

This is exactly what I added to my ~/.bashrc

function f7zipi() { 
    local f
    for f in $@; do 
        ls -alF "$f"
        7za a -si -t7z -m0=lzma -mx=9 -mfb=64 \
        -md=64m -ms=on "$f.7z" < "$f" && 
            touch -r "$f" "$f.7z" && 
            rm -fv "$f" && 
            ls -alF "$f.7z"
    done
}
export -f f7zipi

When I only assign the above function into a terminal’s bash command line, a script running from that command line fails when it calls the function… If I further apply export -f f7zipi to that same command line.. then the script succeeds… However the scipt only works for that particular commandline session.

When the function and export are included into ~/bashrc, the script works every time, in any bash session..

This is the test script

#!/bin/bash
f=/tmp/$USER.abc
g=/tmp/$USER.lmn
rm -fv "$f" "$f".7z
rm -fv "$g" "$g".7z
printf 'abcdefg'>"$f"
printf 'lmnopqr'>"$g"
IFS=$'\n'; f=($(find /tmp -maxdepth 1 -name "$USER.*")); f7zipi "${f[@]}"
exit